How A Fitness Coach Plans To Crack Wall Street

Many of us here in the community have had some contact with Academy memberCandice White. Candice, known as Candi in the community, is a key member of the London Real Academy Tribe.

Her mission is to wake up each day and “help others.”

Candice is a Fitness and Nutrition Coach. She calls herself a “plant-powered vegan entrepreneur.” Naturally, her favourite London Real guests are people like Peter Sage and Timothy Shieff.

Candice is a great example of an Academy member who has several passions. She is using one passion to reach the next.

In her recent post in the Activity Feed, Candice has inspired other members to fully exploit the rich resources here in the Academy. She has inspired us to think about the following:

Passive consumption

Procrastination

Fear and your comfort zone

Focus and action

Candice shared her insights through this post. The full post can be read here.When Candice posted her insights, she also shared her success. The next step was to bring her product from her software business to the market, yet she needed considerable funding.

What did she do? She pitched!

Her pitching was successful and the “plan is to roll out a soft launch with a US-based distribution partner and independent retail traders, who will have access to the application/platform” in early 2016!

This is Candice with her business partner as they are talking through their business model with a potential distribution partner in the USA.

This week in Tribe Talk, Candice shares more about her pitch and her innovative product. She shows that the resources and content available on the Academy, are just the start of your journey.

The hard work really begins after we hit the stop button on our phones and laptops.

When we press pause, we are supported by a community of like-minded peers in our own private network. Academy members help us to start processing this incredible knowledge and make it truly useful to us so that we action our goals and start creating.

As Candice says, “the most fundamental takeaway is to build a better version of yourself, all of the other learnings are facets of this primary goal. This shift in mindset is infectious and people are inspired, beginning their own journeys as a result.”

Member Interview with Candice White

Tell us about yourself

“I am a deeply passionate, plant-powered vegan entrepreneur living in Vancouver, Canada. I emigrated to Canada from the UK in 2005. I would describe myself as someone with a versatile skill set and a curious mind. At the moment, I am running two ventures. I’m an independent online fitness and nutrition coach and a founder of a financial technology start up. My ultimate goal is to scale my existing tech business to an exit in five years and become a KPI in High Performance Fitness Coaching and Vegan Nutrition. My dream is to build my own fitness and nutrition brand and eventually open a wellness centre. My software business has the potential to lift off the ground very soon and when it scales, the plan is to have this support and fund my goal of opening a wellness centre.”

What is the concept of your software business?

“My SaaS start up called Machine Readable News, is working in the big data analytics field. Our key objective is to disrupt the existing financial industry and create an innovate platform to assist retail traders. Through the London Real Apple TV, Brian’s mission was to put the BBC out of business. My firm is attempting to crack Wall Street! It is widely known that large institutions and hedge funds have access to critical market data before the retail trader. Our mandate is to close the gap and make this information accessible to the little guy too. We work with large data sets and use news and social media information and plug this into our various machine learning models and algorithms to predict the future price of a stock. This is a platform built by the people for the people. We’ve been in research and development for a few years and plan to launch in Q1 next year with the backing from the Canadian NRC Industrial Research Assistance Program.”

Can you share more about the idea or product you pitched for?

“At this time, I am unable to share too many details prior to the launch date, but my firm is taking a unique and skilled approach to sentiment and big data and its financial application. Our vision and value proposition is working towards forecasting market returns using machine intelligence. We identify areas of risk and in return a large portfolio of stocks in real time using machine learning. Our software allows users to visualise stocks of interest in a large group with high return or high risk potential. The machine intelligence model uses proprietary news and social media data feeds. It displays data ahead of any web content, giving users a significant opportunity to take action. This extremely valuable resource allows the retail trader (not just the large hedge funds and institutions) to get a handle on what’s happening in the financial markets. Our vision is to level the playing field and provide real time actionable information.”

Can you share your pitching method?

“My pitching technique is by no means perfect. In fact, I would argue it requires a fair amount of fine tuning. The key is to be comfortable with being uncomfortable. Having said that, I believe that if you’d like to be successful, it’s important to keep in mind the old military adage, ‘proper planning and preparation prevents poor performance.’ Plan your work, then work your plan. Oren Klaff’s ‘Pitch Anything’ methodology, struck a chord with me because the system bodes well with the personalities I come to contact with in the financial industry. My method was influenced by the culmination of knowledge I have acquired over the last few months by listening and observing other Academy members. In particular, one Academy member, Archie Ology inspired my pitch and pitching methods because he recently pitched to a large bank in Amsterdam using the Klaff methodology. This worked out well for him, so I used the main principles that Archie utilised for his own pitch. You can find the principles here. I also ventured into the startup community in Vancouver.

This is Candice and her team at Vancouver Startup Week on September, 2015. The second person on the left is Gregor Robertson, the Mayor of Vancouver.

How do you become a passive consumer of knowledge which seeks to inform, educate and inspire?

“The content inside the Academy is vast and exceedingly valuable. Yet, I realised I was passively consuming information week after week and not actually taking any action. It is easy to avoid putting your ideas and thoughts down on paper because there’s always another interview with valuable information or a different ‘take on things.’ It’s important to not lose focus and set some SMART goals. This was happening because I was unclear on the direction of my two projects and it was much easier to research, listen to guests and talk with Academy members than making some tough business decisions. To paraphrase Brian, ‘research is just fear masquerading as procrastination’.”

Why did you join London Real Academy?

“The real question would be why wouldn’t one want to join? In a sincere carpe diem moment, it was obvious to me that it was time to get serious and I saw the London Real Academy as the catalyst for change, not only as a movement, but as a family. A place where one can achieve growth of personal and professional development. I believe that accountability, peer support and interacting with passionate, authentic, real life people will press you to keep your goals. Mutual accountability is extraordinarily effective and the Academy is filled with incredible, authentic people with a like-minded outlook on life. Accountability was already a large component of my online fitness business model and so this facet really resonated with me.”

How do you keep accountable?

“At the moment, I use the SMART goals concept and it works really well. It’s important that I surround myself with people that can push me and add value to my life and for whom I can do the same in return. In the Academy, I have accountability partners for various areas of my life, such as business, finance, fitness and spirituality. My business buddy, more a mentor, Chris Albert chats with me regularly via text message and we talk about our ventures and offer advice, if required. For example, he helped me decide the best course of action with regards to my two separate ventures. In return, I am reading his Ketogenic diet book and providing feedback.”

Which one feature do you benefit from most in the Academy? Why?

“This really is a tough question because there are many benefits to the Academy. If I had to choose one, it would be the Private London Real Academy Facebook Group. It provides a platform for members to interact with one another, inspire each other, add value, seek advice and stay up-to-date with what’s happening in the Academy. The added bonus is seeing the occasional post from Peter Sage and Jamie Alderton. I have a few accountability partners and we use the Private Message system for this purpose.”

Candice has been offering her skills in high-performance fitness coaching to some Academy members. She won this London Real Academy T-Shirt for assisting Academy member Brenda with a vegan nutritional plan during the preparation for her bikini competition.Candice would like to continue to offer her skills in fitness coaching and nutrition. She’s also happy to provide insight into running a start up and scaling a business with little or no capital. If you can help her refine her pitching and publishing skills, she would love to connect! You can send her a message here.

In Candice’s view, physical meetups are an integral part of the Academy because they allow Academy members to come together in their communities to collaborate and exchange ideas. With that in mind, Candice is planning the first official London Real Academy and Vancouver Real Meetup for early February 2016. This is a photo of her Meetup with Vancover Real and a couple of other Academy members!

If you’re from the Vancouver area,make sure you don’t miss out on this meetup! The details of the Meetup will be announced here soon!

Tribe Meetups

There’s still to join Academy members on 19th December for a Pre-Christmas dinner in Toronto! But be quick, bookings fill up quickly at this time of the year!

Below you can see a picture of event host Marie-Judith Jean-Louis sharing her vlog about the meetup.

Come and meet our host and organiser, Academy member Guillaume Hung for a session of Mindfulness Meditation. Below is a video from last month’s session

See if there’s a Meetup scheduled in your city here, and if there isn’t let me know what Meetup you’d like to see and if you’d like to host one!

Until next week’s Tribe Talk, have a great week, and if you’d like to get in touch with me, message me @noorahnaker – it would be really lovely to hear from you!

Speak soon,

Noorah

P.S. The first Focus Group dates for 2016 are getting filled, so we’ve decided to add a further 10 spaces for you! This is a group photo of us all after the last Focus Group at the studio! Get one in your calendar!